The Gottlieb-Kim Trail

Thursday, May 8, 2008

If anyone is still reading this here is the text that should have been up when we were in OK.

For some reason the text I wrote for Oklahoma City didn't end up on the blog with the pictures. The first post talked about how we expected Oklahoma City to be boring but it actually seemed pretty interesting. The people there are very nice and are more than happy to talk to you about ANYTHING.

We went to the National Cowboy Museum expecting to kill an hour or two tops and ended up wishing we could stay all day. It was really cool and a HUGE museum. They had tons of artifacts and we learned a lot about Cowboys, rodeo history, and the rape and destruction of the land and native people. We only made it through maybe half of the museum and that was without taking the time to even read/look at everything. It's definitely a good destination if you travel across the country.

Then we found a part that turned out to be a model of an old western town. We decided to play "High Noon" which the local sheriff didn't like and that's when I got thrown in jail (the pic shown on the post titled "on the inside"). After getting out we talked to this guy who worked at the museum. He told us a lot of awesome destinations between OK city and LA. None of which we had time to visit. He had tried the Big Texan steak 15 years ago and failed. He informed us that Amarillo TX is "flatter than hammered dog shit". That has a nice ring to it.

Tuesday, May 6, 2008

After 4000 miles in a 16' truck that goes 75 mph, we've finally arrived in LA! Usually the nostalgia of LA hits me pretty quickly when I fly over the smog in a plane, but this time it was really gradual because of the driving. As soon as I get my computer unpacked and set up I'll begin posting non-iPhone photos of the trip!

Sunday, May 4, 2008

If anyone plans to take down the 72 oz steak at the Big Texan, I would strongly advise against it. If you think that you're in for some delicious Texan steak and a lot of it like I did, you are going to be in for a big surprise. After my first bite of medium rare steak I knew that it was going to be a lot tougher than I thought because the steak wasn't really all that tasty. It made sense that this 72 oz only costs 72 dollars.

So it wasn't a matter of quantity anymore, it was all about the ability to swallow whole pieces of chewy, mediocre steak because it's the chewing and the bland taste that really makes it dreadful. At about ten minutes left I started to gag every time I tried to knock back a small piece of the tasteless steak with a swig of water. It made sense that Kobayashi (the hot dog eater) trains by swallowing ice cubes since it really is about the skill required to swallow things whole without chewing.

All in all I was able to eat 50 oz of steak, a salad, a shrimp cocktail, and a dinner roll. And since I stopped ten minutes early when I knew 22 ounces of cold steak and a baked potato was going to be impossible, we got some dessert since I had room for a couple spoonfuls. We thought it'd be funny to eat dessert on the main stage after such a big meal.